


Anytime.

by sergeant_smudge



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Crowley (Good Omens) Whump, Drowning, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Rescue, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 11:48:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3066755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sergeant_smudge/pseuds/sergeant_smudge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's icy water in his lungs, and he can't seem to remember that he doesn't need to breathe. </p><p>Thoughts while drowning and a rescue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anytime.

**Author's Note:**

> A study in drowning that I wrote about a century ago and just got around to posting.  
> Lemme know.

The water was cold. It pumped its way into his ears and stung his eyes and flooded his nose, burning into his brain. Strange, he thought, how such icy conditions created such a heat in his mind. The fluid was sucked involuntarily into his mouth, down his throat, into his chest. Crowley tended to forget that he didn’t need to breathe in these situations.

He’d been drowned a lot in the past few… days? No. Weeks. Months, maybe? He’d lost track. It was hard to keep track of time when his only real signal of time passing was how little he’d dried since the last dunking. But back to the first thing:

The water. It was cold. Crowley found himself paying a lot of attention to this fact as the hand on his head pressed harder. The fingers rested on his brain stem, clenching around the nape of his neck. In the last few seconds before he went unconscious, Crowley liked to pretend that those fingers were about to drag him out of the water, instead of the opposite, but it never happened.

Around this time, the hopeless flailing was coming to an end, declining as his muscles ran out of oxygen and energy to sustain him. He had no control over the animalistic spasms that rocketed through his limbs, the panicked screams for air that ricocheted throughout his skull. His brain ached, ears muted from the thick bubbles of water that acted as pressure instead of sound. His bound legs and arms fought hard, desperately kicking and searching for anything to hit, but it seemed that the hand that held him was never connected to anything else.

Sometimes he’d scream. There were times when he hadn’t had time to brace himself, to remind himself that he would be pulled out just in time. They wouldn’t kill him. Not yet at least. And at these times, he panicked. The water bucket churned, air bubbles searching for their way out of the place, erupting like boiling water from a volcano. The sound of his scream was the loudest thing he had ever heard, every time. It was thunder and earthquakes, avalanches and sonic booms. His own voice cinched around his head, an iron vice that held onto him and refused to relinquish its grip.

His bare and freezing feet slid across the flat concrete floor, the traction long lost with the constant motion of water. His shirt had been gone since the first day he remembered waking up in the tiny room, but his pants were still there – black slacks that had cost a fortune in their prime. That probably meant something to him in the past. They were shredded, holes and tears ripping through the fabric. They’d taken his belt; couldn’t give him an edge, an escape route. He wasn’t sure who They were, and Crowley felt it wasn’t much use to dwell on it.

The water was forcing its way into his lungs, and it burned. He remembers cheap vodka, expensive whiskey, old, old scotch that had felt the same way. It wasn’t the same, not really, but it always triggers the memory. He tries not to remember wine - to forget expensive grapes lost to time in warm, warm rooms. He doesn’t want to think about that. He refuses to think about that.

And Crowley can feel himself getting to this point now, the final bit when his knees crack against the ground, when his wrists collapse in on themselves against their ties, when his neck stops pushing against the hand, against gravity. He sinks into the water, and in his mind, it overflows the barrel, spilling over onto the floor like all of the waterfalls he’s ever seen. He can feel the water in a strange sort of way, because it’s all around and inside him, so cold and so hot all at once. It’s like ice against skin, and it’s so wrong, and when he’s in this stage he only is sure that it used to be better. And he knows he’s not going to die, but on some level he believes he will, wishes for it even, because it’s probably nicer than this.

The hand pulls him out now, fingernails digging into his skin, clenching hard, and yanking him from the arctic ocean. It tosses him onto his back, and the water flows from everywhere, and he coughs, hard, four times. Crowley lies on his side, crouched around himself, and he shakes. There are fault lines in his bones, and they send tremors through his body. He coughs harder, and his lungs are crying out, expanding, shrinking, finding salvation, but mostly just breathing. His limbs are waking, and he drags himself by his elbows, and every time it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done. He pulls himself forward until his head touches a wall, and he flinches. Every time. Crowley pulls himself into the corner, folding his body into the space, his back aligning with the angle.

There’s water leaking from his eyes, his nose, his ears, and his mouth. It drips from his hair like a storm, and he distantly watches it puddle on the ground with foggy eyes. His chest heaves of its own accord, aching and sputtering as it forces the last of the water from the exhausted muscles. His shoulders are soaked, and the water trails down his abdomen, tracing to his hips and dampening the waistline of his pants.

He falls asleep shivering, wishing for warmth and instead dreaming of storms, of charcoal clouds and hail that stings his eyes. He can’t remember what’s behind the warmth-lit window in the distance, what waits for him, what sits in the back of his memory. But he remembers the ice on his feet, the snow in his hair, the convulsions that seized his hands and held him paralyzed in that terrible tundra.

Crowley wakes up somewhere worse. The room is the same, four concrete walls, no windows. One is split by a steel door with only a small slot available from the outside at eye level. He used to see it as a speak-easy, and he remembered those well. They were warm.

But now he only sees it as an alarm, a sign that it’s going to happen again. The door opens about a hundred drips from his hair after he wakes up. The hand grasps at his neck, and it hauls him to the never-moving bucket. It’s always there, a fixed place. It has become Polaris in this awful new world.

He knows that he should be able to fight against these five digits that rub against his hair, he should, but he cannot, and so he suffers. Crowley feels himself pass the first threshold that comes with drowning, where his lungs know that they are going to need more air soon, and they wish to make him aware of this. That funny feeling in his stomach that never gets any less worse. The grip tightens on his neck and sinks him deeper. His feet push against the floor as the panic sets in, and his toes have gone numb. His mouth starts releasing air, and he doesn’t bother fighting against it. He lets himself scream, because sometimes it feels a little better if he does, and he takes whatever comfort he can get.

The world is spinning, and the hand is tightening even more on the back of his throat, and he can’t help but notice the irony of the fact that he is really _really_ thirsty right now. The water is in his chest now, and there are spots in his vision, and he’s not being pulled up, why isn’t he being pulled up? His legs kick harder against the cement, and he thinks he can hear shouting above him. Crowley is panicking because, wow he really cannot breathe now, and he can’t even suck in any more water because his lungs are filling and spilling over like they’re operated by an unskilled bartender, and suddenly he can’t move anymore. His legs give out, and his arms sag, elbows falling over his hips, and he sinks down. He’s being sucked into the water, and his lifeline is thinning.

The hand is off his neck. He feels its absence like something taken, and his head sinks further into the water. At this point, he can dimly acknowledge that he should take advantage of the situation and pull himself from the water, but he cannot for the life of him – as limited as it may be – move any of his muscles. There’s a lot of shouting above him, still, and it’s accompanied by fast movement. He can hear shoes moving, and Crowley wonders if that is the last sound that he will ever hear.

It is not. Shockingly enough.

He’s dipping into unconsciousness now, and there’s a hand back on his neck, for a split second. The hand is fast, and the fingers are different. They’re on his neck, along his hairline, and he’s only held for a moment. He feels himself being lifted, swiftly pulled from his prison. He’s on the concrete, and there’s air somewhere around here, but it’s too far away for him to reach and he thinks maybe he’ll never find it.

“Crowley!” yells a noise, and it is also not the last sound he will ever hear. He wants to know who that noise is. He lolls onto his side, disorientated and bleeding water again. He coughs now, nine times, and his lungs burn, hacking coughs echoing up through his chest. His head is spinning around itself, and there’s so much water everywhere. “Crowley!” says that same noise, and it’s followed swiftly by a loud grunt and a body hitting the floor.

There are hands on his shoulders, and they’re good hands, he thinks. They haul him upwards, and he moans, still coughing. “Crowley, can you hear me?” asks a frantic voice, and it’s the same noise from before.

“Ngk,” he says, because he feels like he can manage it, and there’s a hand under his head, and he wonders if he’s expected to open his eyes, because that sounds like a lot of demands. He coughs again, and retches a bit as the exhausted muscles give their grand finale, but there’s only water. Crowley feels himself tilted to his side, and there’s never ending water, from his eyes too now, flowing steadily.

“It’s alright, dear boy, I have you, don’t worry,” Aziraphale says, arms securely around the damp demon. Crowley coughs, and his entire body shakes, his hands searching for something solid to hold onto. Aziraphale grasps at his hand, and Crowley involuntarily pushes off of it, his chest rattling. His hair is dripping, and his entire torso is wet, his skin frozen to the touch. Aziraphale can see from here that Crowley’s lips are purple, his skin flushed and pale. His eyes are sunken into grayed sockets, flighty movements twitching through his face whenever he gets a breath in.

Crowley’s weight is practically nonexistent, his ribs pushing away his skin, hipbones barely clinging onto pants that he used to fill out solidly. Bruises decorate his flesh, purple and yellow masses spread along his collarbone and stretching to his pectorals. All across his shoulders and sprinting down his arms, twisting around his elbows and engraved in his wrists. There are ink blotches pressed and ironed into his neck, purpling blemishes blending into the landscape that his hair grows upon. He groans, hands still fighting for purchase on anything they can find, and his face contorts, throat bobbing as the sound rumbles from his chest. “Hurts,” Crowley manages, and he rolls onto his back, body still endlessly twitching. Aziraphale presses fingers to his cheek, hoping some of his warmth will seep into Crowley. The demon’s eyes close, and it’s an unsteady movement that shuts them.

Aziraphale focuses in on his aura, changing his view like the movement of a camera lens. It’s still the same color it has always been – blackened silver and deep golden reds – but it flickers unsteadily now. It’s dim and faded, watered down and washed out. It shakes with his too-fast heartbeat, the speed of a shrew as it warbles along. “Time to go, I think,” Aziraphale says quietly, because he can hear the chaos beginning outside as the guards realize that eight of their people have been taken down sometime in the last few minutes.

He scoops Crowley from the floor, grunting as he takes on what is a concerningly small amount of weight. The demon makes a soft noise as he is lifted, probably out of discomfort, and his eyes hold tighter to themselves. His left hand clenches against Aziraphale’s back, holding steady like a ship at port. His right hand continues to move, never halting, his fingers jolting against the gravity that holds them there.

“Thank you,” says a voice, and it doesn’t belong with the body that it comes from. “Aziraphale,” it adds, and this time it sounds right coming from Crowley’s mouth. His hand holds tighter in the angel’s sweater, and he smiles.

“Any time,” Aziraphale murmurs back.

 

 


End file.
